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Mi3 Audio Edition

Mi3 Audio Edition

A weekly wrap of the “must-know” developments in Marketing, Media, Agency and Technology for leaders and emerging leaders in the industry. Veteran industry journalist and Mi3 Executive Editor Paul McIntyre talks each week with guest marketers who are in the know on what matters at the nexus of marketing, agencies, media and technology. Powered mostly by Human Intelligence (HI).

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48 min•
Monday

‘Clients in on it, boatloads of cash, complex, opaque corporate structures’: Principal media arbitrage trading spreads to TV, out of home, audio as holdco’s, retail media pile in; ex-IPG, GroupM, Omnicom execs on fixes

Host: Paul McIntyre | Executive Editor Media agency holding company CEOs are openly acknowledging the importance of arbitrage-based principal trading to their business models – and it’s spreading rapidly out of digital display into TV, audio, digital out of home, connected TVs and beyond. Former UM Global Chief Media Officer Joshua Lowcock, who left the IPG-owned media agency network last year to head up media at US group Quad, is bleak on the distorting market effects of holding companies buying media for themselves and on-selling to advertiser clients with handsome mark-ups - often in ‘bundled’ products which blend a small quota of quality inventory with the tonnage more in low value, low quality ad placements. “Both agencies and clients have built themselves a prison that they can't get out of,” says Lowcock. And agencies resisting principal models are increasingly disadvantaged – they risk being dragged into “financial engineering” too. Per Lowcock, “somewhere in the myriad of complexity of a holding company, I can tell you it's occurring and a large armoured vehicle with boatloads of cash is pulling up somewhere and unloading it into a holding company … well, it's probably more electronically transferred.” Should anyone care that agencies are finding ways to make money that procurement-driven clients are in effect incentivising by refusing to pay fees for service – especially if the media bought and on-sold arguably does the job? “It's not doing the job because clients are not getting the media that they should be getting to drive the ultimate business performance,” Lowcock argues. "They’re getting the media that drives the agency's bottom line,” per Lowcock. He describes it as a nutritionist advising a diet of “junk food”, with clients at risk of morbid obesity. Indy shop Media by Mother, headed by former GroupM exec Dave Gaines, says he doesn’t do principal media deals or arbitrage but “it’s surprisingly hard to get people to align on business success outcomes” versus the short-term allure of trading off not paying media agency fees for the hidden costs in mark-ups and tech and data fees typically wrapped into principal media agreements. Moreover, Gaines says retail media is making the situation worse with retailers becoming media owners and seeking their own preferential deals. While traditional media owners complain about principal media trading eating their margin and agency mark-ups making them appear expensive, Gaines says the truth is, “a lot of the big TV networks don't like to have to deal directly with clients. They're happy to offload a lot of this media inventory because then they haven't got to worry about selling it”. Either way, few owners will complain publicly for fear of retribution, i.e. being cut out of group spend, per Nick Manning, non-executive chairman of Media Marketing Compliance and adviser to peak US advertiser body the ANA. Manning sees principal media’s rise leading holdcos to becoming just the same as the walled gardens whose business models they are trying to emulate. “They're all building AI tools that will do creative production, media distribution and analytics together in one in one box. It will be a black box, and clients won't be able to tell a lot about what's going on in there, but it will be an arbitrage-led model.” Quad’s Lowcock says he’s happy to tell any finance, procurement, marketing, legal and internal auditing department “all the answers” as to what goes on and how to fix it – and does just that in this podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Clients in on it, boatloads of cash, complex, opaque corporate structures’: Principal media arbitrage trading spreads to TV, out of home, audio as holdco’s, retail media pile in; ex-IPG, GroupM, Omnicom execs on fixes
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30 min•
Thursday

‘Size the opportunity, then seize it’: Flight Centre global CMO prepares for category expansion, revenue take-off via owned media-publisher pivot

Four years ago, Flight Centre’s global CMO Megan Henderson was tasked with leading a sweeping restructure of Flight Centre’s worldwide marketing operation – centralising five teams into one while overhauling its martech stack and contracts and simultaneously finding efficiencies and growth. Daunting. But Henderson knew that Fight Centre’s 60 million annual unique online visitors, broad customer comms channels yielding rich first party data plus circa 400 physical stores could help drive the business into fresh territory – adjacent travel market services beyond flights – while generating revenue via owned media packaged and sold to new and existing brand partners. Enter owned media valuations specialist, Sonder, which dived deep to benchmark and calculate the value of each and all of Flight Centres channels and assets – and highlight where it could go next as an owned media network. Now Henderson aims to make Flight Centre a global case study in how customers, data, physical and digital footprint combine to drive growth, revenue, profit and cross-funnel, cross-category expansion – while landing new paying partners. It’s now rolling out screens across all stores to boost brand building capability and link it through to first party data-powered conversion. “Having Sonder shine a light on what we could be doing with our digital screens has really fast-tracked the process for us to make sure that our stores have a minimum of two digital screens that I can use for brand advertising with all kinds of partners,” says Henderson. She’s now ensuring partners think of Flight Centre “as a mass market retailer with millions of customers online and in store… and see that as an opportunity that they can't get with a standard media buying mix.” Sonder co-founder, Jonathan Hopkins, says that’s the key takeout for businesses currently leaving money on the table by overlooking their owned media channels and assets: “There is vast opportunity out there. If you have a website, store network, an email program with a sizeable customer base, then you're more than halfway there to building an owned media proposition to leverage through your own marketing and with brand partners,” says Hopkins. “It’s all about seizing the opportunity.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘Size the opportunity, then seize it’: Flight Centre global CMO prepares for category expansion, revenue take-off via owned media-publisher pivot
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57 min•
6 Mar

‘The accountability for creativity stops with me’: Suncorp’s brand-CX chief Mim Haysom dukes it with Sir John Hegarty and Val Morgan Cinema’s Guy Burbidge on attention, entertainment, culture and marketing’s creative conundrum

Mim Haysom’s world-beating, Cannes-winning One House initiative at Suncorp in 2022 was a big bold bet on innovative, mould-breaking marketing that Suncorp’s executive leadership and board only saw days before a documentary on the initiative was set to broadcast on Nine. “The first time the board saw One House, I took them into the auditorium and played them the 26-minute documentary three nights before it was going live on Channel Nine,” says Suncorp’s Executive GM, Brand & Customer Experience. “The accountability for creativity stops with me … I set myself up that way from the get-go.” Haysom is also the person who tells the CFO she needs incremental money for performance media – and not to siphon it out of brand. “Insurance search terms [at peak cost of living crunch] were 50 per cent up year on year. They are about 35 per cent up now. With that there is opportunity to pump more money into search to capture demand. So, I've absolutely been doing that,” she says. “But what I've been doing is writing business cases to say … we don’t touch brand … because if you haven't got that awareness, consideration, if you're not building trust in your brand – especially in insurance – then people won't convert in the lower levels anyway.” Legendary adman Sir John Hegarty couldn’t agree more. “The trouble is we live in a bubble called commerce, and the people out there don't – they live in a world called ‘engage me, entertain me’,” he says. It’s a challenge Val Morgan Cinema’s Guy Burbidge has been wrestling with for cinema. There’s an "awful lot more measurement conversations” which Burbidge says is a "good thing ... but it’s an increasingly binary conversation about reach and cost and not the power of a [media] platform and creativity. “We've gone down too much science, arguably, with too many ones and zeros and cost and reach and algorithms. The next piece of work for us is talking to the creative community to understand how do you take advantage of those cultural moments created by movies and cinema as they come up.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘The accountability for creativity stops with me’: Suncorp’s brand-CX chief Mim Haysom dukes it with Sir John Hegarty and Val Morgan Cinema’s Guy Burbidge on attention, entertainment, culture and marketing’s creative conundrum
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41 min•
27 Feb

Two second rule: System1 and JCDecaux effectiveness research shows 70% of Out-of-Home ads fail, the brands nailing it – and seven easy fixes

A world first creative benchmarking study from System1 and JCDecaux has run stacks of Australian Out-of-Home ads through its globally-renowned effectiveness scoring system and drawn a stark conclusion: 70 per cent of outdoor ads fail to move the needle. Andrew Tindall, SVP – Global Partnerships at System1, goes even further: “No-one understands how Out-of-Home works,” he says, particularly the critical need to land the brand within two seconds. At face value, not a wholly positive headline for the medium. But System1 has come up with a formula that, its data strongly suggests, massively improves effectiveness. It’s not rocket science. For example, just placing your logo at the top of an Out-of-Home ad increases brand recognition four times versus a logo parked at the bottom. Likewise be consistent – entertaining and never boring – and keep messaging simple and positive to get much higher brand lift, and ultimately, sales. On that front, Tindall says there is a false divide between brand and performance campaigns: The long, i.e. brand, always drives the short, i.e. performance. The research with JCDecaux, “allows us to add a lot more nuance to what is a very non-nuanced industry” and underlines why brand and demand “need to be brought back a little bit closer together”. Brands nailing Out-of-Home effectiveness locally include Compare the Market with its Meerkats, Uber Eats with the Wiggles and Simon Cowell, Specsavers and Ocean Spray, per Tindall. Sephora’s latest campaign, he says, is one of the highest scoring Out-of-Home ads System1 has ever tested. The bottom line? “The single standout thing for me in this research is it confirms that creative is the make and break of how effective a campaign can be.” Tindall, plus JCDecaux’s Cris Smart and Scott Jenkins, unpack the research’s key findings – and the seven simple steps to massively boost Out-of-Home effectiveness.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two second rule: System1 and JCDecaux effectiveness research shows 70% of Out-of-Home ads fail, the brands nailing it – and seven easy fixes
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47 min•
24 Feb

CDP Payoffs and Pitfalls: Australian brands are slashing customer acquisition costs, gaining behavioural insights, and getting ready for AI in their customer data tech but the devil hits in implementation

Host: Andrew Birmingham, Editor - CX | Martech | Ecom Two years after a Mi3 published a comprehensive analysis of the customer data market in Australia, we revisited many of the brands we spoke with to assess their progress and measure their return. Companies that have persevered are realising strong returns and extending beyond their early use cases. But it has often been a hard road to hoe. There are integration and organisational challenges to overcome - and unexpected problems such as bill shock from unanticipated quarterly charges that can run into tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. As to the market, it’s more competitive than ever with the number of CDP vendors active in Australia rising significantly even though the volume of tenders has largely held the line, according to industry insiders. That means competition is heating up. There are three macro trends – the rise of composable CDPs - we’ll explain that later - and greater CIO control over data infrastructure amid a backdrop of three-year software renewals rolling over and the need to accurately assess ROI for a technology that is often hard to assign direct value against. Rich McFarland from Compare Club, Courtney Gerrits from the University of Tasmania, and Cam Strachan from Southern Cross Austereo dive deeply into the detail, discussing their experience with their own CDP implementations, describing the tangible benefits gained, such as improved customer acquisition costs, enhanced communication strategies, and increased operational efficiencies…there’s a few lessons they learned along the way to boot too.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CDP Payoffs and Pitfalls: Australian brands are slashing customer acquisition costs, gaining behavioural insights, and getting ready for AI in their customer data tech but the devil hits in implementation
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33 min•
20 Feb

SCA backs hyper-local radio, earlier ad integration to beat rival’s $200m metro talent transplant, rides anti-global, anti-algo new wave

Rival radio networks are transplanting big talent from Sydney and trying to make it work in Melbourne. SCA Chief Content Officer, Dave Cameron, is taking the opposite strategy. Local talent that “speaks the language of the city” and gets the “fabric” of its suburbs is particularly crucial for breakfast audiences, he says. Plus, as platforms and content globalise, localism becomes a competitive advantage: “Anti-globalism will pay dividends for us … otherwise we’re playing the same game as everyone else.” Hence SCA launching six new shows, pairing fresh local talent with station “juggernauts” while focusing harder on radio’s core heartlands – like Western Sydney, where massive audiences and engagement are found. “That is where the bulk of radio listening, the bulk of audience data and surveys, is happening,” per Cameron. “It's not happening in Bondi.” SCA is laser-focused on growing audiences and revenues without blowing holes in the budget that could later prove problematic. Content economics are underpinned by sharpened appetite for advertiser integration – with those commercial discussions happening upfront and early. “We’ve never been more commercially savvy around that,” says Cameron. Seeking new audiences via greener talent and formats could risk dislocating “rusted-on” loyalists, Cameron acknowledges. “But we believe in the combinations we’ve put together,” he says. “If you're not investing in fresh thinking, talent and voices, your industry may become irrelevant.” Plus, there’s growing evidence to suggest a younger set is discovering the analogue dial – either through nostalgia, or as a reaction to algorithmic overreach. The next year will test SCA’s strategy, but Cameron’s confident audiences will hold and then grow. The alternative is to keep hoping the world doesn’t change, or emulate the metro lift and shift being attempted by rivals. Can that transplant strategy pay off, given time to bed-in? “That’s a $200 million question,” says Cameron. SCA is staking out a different numbers game.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SCA backs hyper-local radio, earlier ad integration to beat rival’s $200m metro talent transplant, rides anti-global, anti-algo new wave
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